Bubba Watson, the Anti-Tiger

For followers of Bubba Watson, the gap wedge he hooked forty yards around trees and gallery and onto the green yesterday to secure his Masters victory wasn’t terribly surprising. Nor was the fact that twice on the eighteenth—once in regulation and again in the playoff—Bubba hit drives that left him throwing distance from the pin on a hole most of the field had to approach with long irons. Bubba’s power, and his shotmaking prowess, are by now as common to witness as Tiger Woods’s Sunday red. You see Bubba pull out the pastel driver (pink clubhead and shaft, his way of supporting breast cancer awareness) and punish the ball with an arrhythmic thwap, the recoil of which requires him to tap step his follow-through, and you know the ball he’s just hit is travelling some three hundred plus yards forward and fifty side-to-side.

It’s unorthodox, Bubba’s game, and until a couple of years ago it was unproven against the multitude of perfectly planed swings the Tiger era has produced—swings like Adam Scott’s and Justin Rose’s, two of the purest on tour, both honed under the direction of Butch Harmon and Sean Foley, respectively, Harmon being one of Tiger’s old coaches, and Foley his current one. Like Tiger, and seemingly most other players on tour, Scott and Rose are forever in lesson mode: fearful of crossing the line on their backswing, of getting stuck inside, of the left elbow being a smidge out of position on the takeaway, throwing the whole process into doubt. Bubba has no such concerns, though, because he’s never had a lesson and, to hear him tell it, never had a swing thought, either. He tees the ball up and smashes it as hard as he can—past everybody on tour, it should be noted—and then hunts it down and smashes it again. Often he finds himself in places not designed for the normal course of play, hence the need to have a forty-yard hook wedge in the bag. This week, though, it worked. Watson, after years of struggle on the P.G.A. Tour, finally broke through in 2010, when he finished in a tie for second at the P.G.A. championship. Now, after taking advantage of a course that favors big hitters, as my colleague John Cassidy predicted he might, Bubba is a major champion, and Rose and Scott, for all their technical perfection, could manage only top tens.

Watson grew up on the Gulf Coast not far from me, and occasionally I would have to compete against him in junior golf tournaments. He’s a few years my senior, so we didn’t face off often, but when he was in the field you knew about it. At the beginning of the tournament you’d hear of his feats the week prior—Bubba carved a three-metal around the clubhouse, landed it pin-high; Bubba drove it over the green on a three-hundred-and-seventy-yard par four; Bubba blasted one out over the lake, brought it back into play with a violent slice. You didn’t know what to believe. Then you would walk to the first tee well before your starting time, watch Bubba launch one, and realize that the rumors were all true. Or true enough. There was solace in the fact that he’d likely hit it deep in the trees, but by the end of the day he’d beaten you, and everyone else.

Autodidacts have all but disappeared from professional golf since 1997, when Tiger won Augusta by a million shots. That victory was proof that greatness on the golf course required constant monitoring and tutelage on the practice tee. Dissections of the golf swing, aided by increasingly advanced high-speed cameras, became commonplace. So did having a swing coach handy at all times to tell you, immediately after you sign your scorecard in Torrey Pines or Pinehurst or Winged Foot or Valhalla, why you overcooked that eight-iron on the fourth hole. (The club got half a click past parallel at the top.) But recently, with Rory McIlroy’s victory last year—McIlroy has a swing coach, but one whose approach is, by modern standards, hands-off—and now with Bubba taking the green jacket in overtime, the play-by-feel method which dominated the game for so long could be making a comeback.

It was hard to imagine, in the days of junior golf, that someone with a swing as non-conformist as Bubba’s could someday win a major. In many ways Bubba was and is the anti-Tiger. He’s a lefty, he’s self-taught, and he’s emotional after the round, not just during it. Yesterday, before Watson could make it to Butler cabin to talk it over with Nantz and Faldo, he was met on the tenth green by some of his biggest fans who just happened to be fellow tour players. There were hugs, and some tears. And a hint, maybe, of a new way forward for golf, a way that feels a bit more natural.

Photograph by Jamie Squire/Getty Images.

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